How AI And Business Analytics Foster Better Collaboration

AI applications are having a very real impact on productivity and collaboration. According to MIT’s Sloan School, generative AI can improve the performance of a highly skilled worker by 40% over their peers who don’t use it. These improvements don’t just apply to individual work, either.

When generative AI and business analytics are combined in an effective manner, it’s often referred to as GenBI. As a non-tech person, I find it fascinating how technologies such as AI and and GenBI are being used to help make person-to-tech collaboration far more effective than it has been in the past. And even more interesting is how it can even help foster better person-to-person collaboration, as well.

What Is GenBI?

Generative BI combines generative AI and business analytics tools to help make analytics data more useful and accessible for business users and data teams alike. It works by connecting a generative AI solution with a business’s existing data sources and analytics tools.

Notably, GenBI systems don’t generally rely on more public-facing generative AI solutions like ChatGPT, largely due to the challenges of uploading so much data to a LLM, and the potential data security issues involved with sharing sensitive corporate data in such a way. However, these systems do still aim to provide a ChatGPT-like experience to create a straightforward and easy approach to business analytics.

Instead, as Avi Perez, CTO at Pyramid Analytics explained in a recent interview with DATAcated, GenBI tools “allow users to submit their request. We hand it to the LLM together with a whole bunch of descriptions of ingredients — what I call ‘ingredients’ — to say, ‘Here’s what is in the user’s database.’ And the LLM basically comes back with the recipe and says, ‘This is how you should ask the question the user is asking for.’ The question is then executed on the data itself.”

Notably, as Perez explains, GenBI tools are the ones “talking to your data, not the LLM. And that makes it scalable, functional, secured, and I actually think it’s the only way in the current era that we know of to make your corporate data work with an LLM.”

How GenBI Is Being Used Today

By using the natural language processing models inherent to generative AI, the people using that information can enjoy greater ease of use as they try to gain relevant insights from their data.

This ensures that the GenBI tool actually delivers answers and results that make sense for the question or request that the user has submitted. With such a model, business users are often able to get answers to business analytics queries in less than 30 seconds, even when submitting a question with relatively vague or plain language.

With the help of GenBI, users are able to look at the information inside the data sources to quickly and effectively perform relevant business analytics tasks, such as creating dashboards and reports, forecasting future results, investigating business performance anomalies and more.

By helping deliver meaningful data points and reports based on the information request, users don’t have to spend countless hours digging through data, coding queries or generating reports manually. Instead, they can focus on actually making use of that information for their own collaborative needs.

How GenBI Can Foster Greater Collaboration

As highlighted in a recent report by Zoom, AI can play a powerful role in improving collaborative efforts. According to the report, 75% of organizational leaders whose teams use AI say it has improved their collaborative abilities.

Ultimately, the biggest benefit of using AI tools comes through time savings. Collaboration often requires significant time. Tasks such as sharing action items, obtaining and evaluating data and sending communication are essential, but can become extremely time-consuming and detract from tasks that are bigger drivers toward the partnership’s strategic goals and activities.

By automating routine or mundane tasks, as well as tasks that can be challenging for individual workers, AI — and GenBI — allow individuals involved in collaborative efforts to save time and focus on things like creative brainstorming sessions or decision-making.

As this example illustrates, GenBI can be a powerful resource for improving internal collaborations. GenBI can help individuals with data preparation and complex analysis, enabling them to work together to identify and communicate crucial insights that can have a very real impact on overall performance — all in an extremely time-efficient manner.

Essentially, GenBI helps democratize a business’s available data so that organizations can optimize marketing strategies, boost their productivity, better understand the dynamics of their sales and logistics processes and more. With the capability to evaluate and utilize any of your organization’s data points, collaborators can enjoy greater transparency and communication as they find solutions to major pain points.

Unleashing Greater Tech Potential

With GenBI tools, businesses have another resource in their arsenal to improve how they access and use data — and that can ultimately be a powerful game-changer in how they collaborate both internally and externally. By enabling all team members to better understand and utilize available data, organizations can operate in a more efficient manner and with more reliable data-backed insights.

When these insights are used to guide collaborative efforts, the potential outcomes at each stage of the partnership can be greatly enhanced and streamlined. From improving internal operations to ensuring clear and transparent communication with external partners, those who take full advantage of GenBI are poised to give themselves a distinct competitive advantage.